


chandeliers still flickering here

by kathillards



Series: girls like girls [13]
Category: GARO: Yami o Terasu Mono
Genre: Alcohol, Canon Compliant, F/F, Minor Injuries, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 10:58:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20599643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: “That’s the way it is, isn’t it? We don’t leave. Sometimes people come in, though.” / Three times Rian and Enhou don't kiss, and one time they do.





	chandeliers still flickering here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snakelesbians](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snakelesbians/gifts).

> sorry about the yamitera of it all :) love you!  
stream death by a thousand cuts by taylor swift.

_i ask the traffic lights if it’ll be alright  
they say “i don’t know”_

.

They kiss under the dim lights of the bar, buzzed up from cocktails and tequila and something even stronger than what the bartender has been making.

Rian’s lying on her back on the floor, one leg propped up on a stool that had tipped over at some point. She points up at the ceiling and pretends to draw a constellation, feels the heat of Enhou’s gaze on the side of her face like the angles of her jawline are at all fascinating.

She says, “Don’t you think it’s funny how the stars in Volcity are the same as the stars outside?”

Enhou replies slowly, from alcohol or from something else thickening her words. “I wouldn’t know, I’ve never left.”

Rian rolls over and braces herself on her elbows, eyes wide. “You gotta go. Out there—there’s so much. This city… it’s so small. So full of… so much.”

“Yeah,” Enhou agrees, as if this makes any sense. Maybe it does, when you are drunk and lying on the floor with a pretty girl who’s never seen the stars outside the city.

Rian opens her mouth to continue and Enhou quiets her with a kiss. Then another, and another. It tastes like alcohol, blue and fizzy and sweet. It tastes like sweat and hunger and longing. Rian leans in for the third on her own.

“Nobody ever leaves,” Rian mumbles against Enhou’s mouth, memorizing the way it curls around hers, the path her lips leave on her cheeks. “None of you ever get to leave.”

“That’s the way it is, isn’t it?” Enhou’s smile is a little crooked and her words are a little tilted, and Rian feels a deep, warm spiral of pleasure and relief uncork inside her just looking at her. “We don’t leave. Sometimes people come in, though.”

Isn’t that what it’s about? Rian wants to say, but the words get swallowed up in another kiss. About people coming in and staying. About the right person walking in the bar, and staying.

She’s clearly been in a fight, but Enhou doesn’t blink twice at the bruises and the blood when Rian stumbles into the police station. She just orders everyone else to go back to their work and takes her to a quiet blue room, full of papers and files, where nobody can hear them. Rian looks around at the names inked on all the boxes until her vision goes cross-eyed.

“Fighting monsters?”

“Of course not.” She runs a finger along a scar on her cheek, thinks about swords and Horrors and spells. A world that seems so far from this police office. So far from Enhou, even though it’s lurking just outside the windows.

Enhou presses a towel to her forehead, then takes a cotton pad to her cheek and the blood trickling down her neck. “I assume you don’t want me to write this up in the system?”

Rian thinks she would let Enhou do anything she wants, if she could. She doesn’t manage to express this, though. Her vision goes cross-eyed, then white, and the next thing she knows, Enhou is kneeling in front of her, hands cupped around her face, the only thing keeping her steady.

“You might need to check in to a hospital,” Enhou says. Her thumb brushes a spot of blood away from the corner of Rian’s mouth.

“No,” Rian coughs. “I can’t.”

She had meant to go back home, to Burai, to get healing spells, but the distance there seemed too far and Enhou’s office was so much closer and maybe she hadn’t fought the pull of her heart as well as she should have.

She means to say now, _I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me_, but the words catch and tangle and die in her throat and instead she looks up into Enhou’s eyes and wonders if maybe she hasn’t been _fine_ this whole time.

She wants to ask: _Did we kiss that night in the bar or did I dream it? Have we always been this close or did I imagine it? Should I run from this or can I stay? Can I stay?_

But she doesn’t.

Enhou kisses her like she’s worried Rian might dissipate in her touch. Everything around them feels hazy but the touch of her lips, that’s solid and warm and real. Unbreakable. Rian kisses her back desperately, thinking about monsters and magic and every force in the world that doesn’t want her to have this. That won’t let her have this.

“I feel better now,” she says with half a laugh at her half a joke.

Enhou smiles and kisses her again.

It’s the night before the end of the world, or at least that’s what it feels like. Rian knows there are other places she should be, other people she should be with, battles she still has to fight—but tonight, she has this.

Enhou kisses the corner of her mouth, the bottom of her jawline, the hollow of her throat. Her voice is a little hoarse when she asks, “Shouldn’t you be stopping me?”

Rian slides her hands into Enhou’s hair, tangles them up and holds tight like she’d disappear if she pulled away. “Why would I stop you?”

“You don’t seem like the kind of girl to want something like this.”

Rian wonders if it’s so obvious what kind of girl she is. If everyone can see. How can they know when she can’t figure it out herself?

“Because I flirt with men?”

“Because you don’t like to be tied down to something real,” Enhou clarifies, skims a hand up Rian’s side, presses a kiss to her shoulder.

“That’s not true.” Rian brings her hands down to cup Enhou’s cheeks, wonders how something so strong between them could seem so fragile at the same time. “I just haven’t had anything real before.”

Enhou’s lips quirk, and then she surges forward to kiss her again. Rian falls back into the bed, gasping a little from the impact. Her hands slip but Enhou catches them, curls her fingers around Rian’s, keeps them interlocked as they lay there on the bed, out of breath from kissing and out of excuses for everything.

“Don’t you ever want to run?” Enhou asks her. “Away from all this? All these people?”

_All the time_, Rian wants to say, but doesn’t. Thinks about Burai, thinks about Ryuga, about Makai Knights, the Senate, her father, her mother. Everyone who’s left her or who might leave her again. Every person in this city caught in a web she can’t even hope to untangle yet.

“Do you?” she asks instead, tracing the line of an old, faded scar down Enhou’s cheek. “I thought you loved this city.”

Enhou’s gaze is unsteady for a second, like she’s fighting against something. “I do.”

She leans in and kisses Rian again. “I do,” she repeats, this time more sure. “I don’t want to run.”

It feels real, when Rian pulls her close and kisses her hard. Real as the moon rises and the stars watch, as the city hums with something deep beneath the surface. Real despite the fact that she still feels like she’s going to lose it all, when she wakes up in the morning.

She spins the detector and waits with bated breath, wishes truth wasn’t something so ephemeral and so hopeless, wishes it didn’t settle like acid in her stomach when Enhou’s eyes glow.

Maybe some part of her had known. Maybe most of her hadn’t. Maybe there’s no road she could have walked that would have led to a different ending.

Enhou’s smile is sinister where once it had been warm. “Surprised?”

“This can’t be right.” Rian’s voice is shaky, her breaths uneven. “This isn’t right.”

“How would you know?” asks the Horror. But then she blinks and the smile twists and somehow, it’s Enhou again.

“I know you,” Rian whispers. “I know you… you’re not a Horror. You’re a human. You work for the police, you work to defend the city, you would never—”

Enhou reaches forward, snags her wrist, and twists until she drops the detector. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“It was real!” Rian gasps, desperate. “It was real, you and me—it was real—”

“What was real?” the Horror demands.

And suddenly, she can’t say.

Maybe she had dreamed it all. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe it had all been a trick of the light, a cruel cosmic joke, a secret spell laid upon her sleep.

Rian thinks about what she would do, in this moment, two months ago. Two years ago. Thinks about what Ryuga might do. What Takeru and Aguri might do. What Burai would tell her to do.

Her childhood training tells her: _Run_.

Rian leans forward and presses her mouth to Enhou’s. To the Horror’s. To whatever it is, to whoever she is. It tastes like Enhou—warm, with the tinge of alcohol, and the sort of hunger you get when you’ve been waiting your whole life for someone who can make you feel like this.

Or maybe that’s just her own projections.

When the kiss breaks, Enhou’s face feels familiar, and her smile seems sad. Maybe she’s overthinking it. Maybe she’s dreaming again.

Maybe it hadn’t been real, the first, third, fifteenth times they had kissed. Maybe this is the real one: the two of them, in an abandoned bar, and the weight of monsters pressing down upon them from beyond the walls.

Days later, when she draws up her memory of Enhou, human and wonderful and alive, to fight with her, she thinks: _This, at least, was real. This is what I can leave her._

“Isn’t it funny?” she says to Ryuga on the walk beyond the walls of Volcity. “How the stars are the same inside and outside?”

Ryuga looks at her, smiles in the way of a boy who hasn’t just lost his mother. He doesn’t say anything, but that night, the two of them make camp on the outskirts of the city and sit by the trunk of an old tree and watch the stars shine over Volcity.

_This is what she would have wanted. To find a brighter night._

She swears she can still see Enhou smile, even if she can’t feel the imprint of the kisses anymore.


End file.
